You Did Good, Kid
by FireHeart Alchemist
Summary: A Reaper!Bones fic was requested on LJ wherein The Kid was injected with C24, and is on board the Enterprise under the name of Pavel Chekov.
1. Chapter 1

**_This is the beginning of a fill for the st_xi___kink_meme. The request was that Chekov was actually The Kid, and Reaper!Bones doesn't know he survived until they see each other on the _Enterprise**.

* * *

"Mutinous insurrection is punishable by death."

Reaper's hands were hot and wet with The Kid's blood, pressing down in a vain attempt to stop the bleeding. His inner medic told him he was as good as dead. The Kid had been shot. Sarge had _shot_ him in the _throat_ because he wouldn't kill innocent civilians.

His hand is shaking and he doesn't really see, doesn't hear past the rush of blood in his ears. That's why he doesn't see a vial of C24 clatter to the floor beside The Kid's head, or notice that it is distinctly less full than it had been in the lab, or that Sam had stuck a needle into The Kid's forearm.

"_IT WAS HIS FIRST MISSION!"_

"And it's not going to be my last!" Sarge snarls back. There is a black look in his eyes and Grimm can't bear to look at him. "I need soldiers!" he yells. "I don't need anybody else but soldiers!" Sam is on his feet before him, and Duke is watching everything with an air of frightful disbelief. He closes The Kid's eyes and stands, hands on his assault rifle.

He faces off with Sarge, both with fingers on the trigger, eyes never leaving each other's face. Everyone is too caught up in the standoff to notice that the hole in The Kid's throat is shrinking, healing bit by bit. Then Pinky points a gun at them before being draw away by The Baron, and everything goes to hell once more.

The first time Private Mark "The Kid" Dantalian comes back from the dead he is alone and in pain, surrounded by the dead. It's dark, and by the sound of it, the base is still in lockdown. He tries to breathe but it whistles through his throat, burbling out blood. His hand goes to the wound, not gaping like it was, but still sizable enough to hurt like a bitch and make it hard to breathe.

He gags and chokes as he rolls onto his stomach, wondering how in the hell can he still be alive. There isn't time for that, he reasons. Not with these monsters, not with Sarge. God, he hopes Reaper's still alive. And Duke. They're good people, even if Reaper can be a little gruff with him, he almost always deserves it.

He half-crawls to the elevator. The countdown tells him he has a quarter hour before quarantine lifts. He's almost made it, almost there when he hears a snarl from behind. He doesn't get a chance to look before his head is smacked in with an almighty crack.

The second time The Kid comes back from the dead, he can hear the snarls and howls of the infected, and he is the only human alive (is he still human? The lack of a giant hole in his throat makes him wonder).

It's dark, terribly dark and yet he can still see, he can smell the stench of infection and death, hear the creatures (zombies? demons?) still wandering around the base. He works his newly healed throat around the invisible lump of fear and draws himself to his feet. He runs back to the Arc Chamber, picking up his twin MP5KA4 light machine gun pistols, snapping in new clips.

"Handle ID: The Kid," a smooth, robotic voice intones. Then it hits him. He's alive. He was shot in the throat and _he's alive!_ The Kid smiles and laughs. If there''s a note of hysteria in there, the dead don't mind. The snarls draw closer and he stops laughing, Marine training kicking in again.

In short, he cleans house. It takes him a good three hours to go through every inch to make sure nothing infected is left alive, and to check and see if there are any survivors. There aren't he cries when he finds the people he had tried to save, mauled or shot or eaten.

He looks for the rest of his team, those who had still been alive. He found Duke's tags in a pile of shredded flesh, but there is no trace of Sarge. No trace of Sam or Reaper. He hopes they've escaped, that they're still alive.

It's a little known fact, but The Kid is an excellent hacker, and is a pro at hotwiring. After combing through every inch of the facility, he wires the old Arc Reactor and the elevator shaft just so. The lift rumbles to a stop and opens. The doors shut, and it's a minute before he reaches the surface. As soon as those doors open, the reactor is triggered and the base explodes. There's nothing visible on the surface really. The ground shivers tremendously and the now-empty lift squeals as it falls back into the earth, cutting of the entrance to Hell.

The Kid holsters his pistols, picks a direction, and walks. He can walk for a long time now, he thinks.


	2. Chapter 2

Part II

It took him ten days to get out of that desert and to find the tiny town of Beatty off of the 95. The heat didn't bother him nearly as much as he thought it should. Hell, he'd worn his full gear for two days before he started really feeling the heat enough to warrant taking it off.

He was good enough with his survivor skills to get enough to eat and drink. He found that his emergency rations were enough for him for about four days. He couldn't recall ever being able to stretch out rations for such a long period of time, but he guessed that the heat simply stole his appetite.

Mark had a lot of time to think in that desert. All he had to do was keep on walking, so his mind was free to mull over the whole mess that was Olduvai. He thought about his squad mates. He hadn't really gotten to know them all that well. It was only his first mission after all.

That thought made him shiver suddenly, hearing Reaper scream something like that to Sarge as he bled out. He reached for his throat reflexively, working his throat as if to prove that yes, he was still alive and no, he didn't have a huge fucking hole in his throat.

How the hell did that happen? Last time he checked, people don't suddenly recover from shit like that. He mustn't have been watching where he was going because found himself hugging the ground and spitting dust from his mouth. His knees and palms smarted from where they'd been scrapped.

The Kid gingerly brushed the gravel and sand from his hands, expecting to feel a twinge of pain but surprised to find there was none. He held his hands up to his face, noting the tiny canyons in his hands had some blood in them, and lots of dirt, but there were no lacerations, no cuts, no scrapes of any kind. He pulled up his pant legs and saw that his knees were in a similar condition.

"What the hell?" An impossible idea formed in his mind. Admittedly, it wasn't as impossible as his revival in Olduvai, but it was still farfetched. Mark took out the switchblade from one of the pockets in his cargo pants and flipped out the blade.

He took a deep breath as he sliced through the sensitive skin of his palm. It hurt a lot less than he thought it would, but he was still quick to apply pressure to the wound by wrapping it in a bit of one of his sleeves that he had cut off. The throbbing sensation was gone almost as soon as he had wrapped his hand. Curious, he pulled off the cloth, wiping off the blood simultaneously.

"Holy shit!" There was no cut on his hand, not a scratch or a scar or a mark to show that he'd just sliced his own hand open. "Holy shit..."

Okay, so apparently sometime between being shot in the throat and passing out, he'd gained the miraculous ability of healing freakishly fast. It was impossible, and yet there it was, like something out of an X-Men comic. He may have been a little hysterical at that point, because all he could think of was that if he were an X-Man, he'd probably have a better codename than 'The Kid'.

He had to get walking. He had to get moving, get out of this desert and into civilization. This was obviously all just some messed up hallucination from the heat messing with his head. Mark's walk morphed into a light job, which became an all-out run.

The scenery whizzed past him and he thought it was funny. It was a huge-ass empty desert. Shouldn't it be going by slowly? He saw the faint markings of a crater or something on the horizon. Judging the distance (ten kilometres, give or take) and counting seconds in his head, he sprinted to the landmark. He was able to keep up his speed the whole way there, which took a grand total of ten minutes. He was hardly out of breath.

"What the fuck man?" He had been running a steady sixty kilometres an hour! Holy hell! "It must be heat stroke or something, messing with my sense of time..." He spent the rest of the day relaxing in the shadow of the crater, determined that all would be back to normal tomorrow when he wasn't having his brain fried by the heat.

That incident was two days into his trek, and he promptly dumped his extra gear, blaming it for his heat stroke or whatever the hell he thought was happening. By the fifth day, when his rations finally ran out, he'd started thinking maybe he wasn't crazy, or he hadn't fried his brain.

He started testing himself, really testing himself. Seeing how long he could run for how fast, how far he could see, how strong he was and, after nearly stepping into a rattlesnake hole, how fast his reflexes were.

It was insane! Mark was now superhuman, he had no better word for it. He was an impossibility, a person the likes of which were only fanciful stories for children.

Or just the kind of person UAC would like to sink their teeth into.

The Kid thought about his situation realistically. As far as he knew, he had been the only survivor of the Olduvai incident, on the brink of death. The only possible explanation he could give was that he'd been infected and had had a completely different reaction from the rest of the monsters. He had seen that the infection didn't spread indiscriminately, didn't affect people the same way.

If scientists got a hold of him, he would be stuck in a lab for the rest of his life, a test subject for them to rip into and push until he broke, one way or another. He couldn't do that, couldn't risk that happening.

With that in mind, he started fabricating another life for himself, another personality. He changed his outfit as much as possible, trying to get rid of anything that could link him to the government, UAC, or the RRTS. He spent the next five days perfecting it.

So by the time he reached Beatty, he was no longer Private Mark "The Kid" Dantalian. He was Bill Slaven, a university student from out of town who came to Nevada to see Vegas and go on a road trip, and had ended up getting completely lost.

There were questions, but five continuous days of preparation had allowed him to handle most of them with ease. He'd gotten a place to stay, some food, and new clothes for the time being.

_Now what?_ he asked himself. _Now what do I do?_


End file.
